CHAPTER 5

THE MANUFACTURING CORE

M
anufacturing is an important economic activity in the United
States. The evidence of this is everywhere--in articles of
clothing, items of preserved food, residential structures, means
of transport and communication, and many other things. In spite
of the presence of items manufactured outside the country,
domestic industry remains paramount, and it is rare for any
medium-sized U.S. town to be without at least some local
employment in manufacturing.

The northeastern United States, excluding northern New
England, is the country's single most significant region of
manufacturing (Map 4:
45K). This region is loosely defined on three
sides by the Ohio River Valley, Megalopolis, and the southern
Great Lakes. The western margin of the region is less clear; it
blends gradually with agriculture-dominant landscapes across
southern Indiana, Illinois, and beyond.

In spite of the region's moderate extent and the growth of
manufacturing elsewhere, the Manufacturing Core continues to be
of tremendous economic significance in American geography. Its
factories produce most of the country's steel, as well as a
significant percentage of its motor vehicles and motor vehicle
parts. Most of the important ports, the main centers of
communication, and the primary financial centers are within or
near the region, and the country's political capital is on the
immediate margins.

The region includes the two largest clusters of coalescing
metropolitan areas: Megalopolis, and the group of large urban
regions between Milwaukee (Wisconsin) and Chicago (Illinois) on
the west, and Cleveland (Ohio) and Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) on
the east.

Understanding America's Manufacturing Core is made difficult
by its strongly dual character. In many respects, it was the
vitality and productivity of the territory's farm population that
created the resources and the demand for industrial production.
Success in agriculture supported the region's early market
centers, and it was the gradual mechanization of agriculture that
demanded diversified manufacturing support. Mechanical reapers,
winnowing machines, and cultivating implements by the tens of
thousands were required during the later 1800s. Tractors, hay
balers, pumps, and increasingly specialized farm machinery
continued to be important local sources of industrial demand
during the first half of the 20th century. Transportation lines
were improved and expanded to carry the tremendous volume of
agricultural products grown on the region's farms.

Therefore, we encounter here a single portion of America
that must be treated as two interdependent thematic regions. One
theme, the urban and industrial nature of the region's
manufacturing centers, is discussed here. The other, the rural
and agricultural character of the territory's small towns and
countryside, is presented in chapter 10.

Turning to the manufacturing theme, what set of conditions
or circumstances led to the development of so complex a mix of
economic interrelationships on this portion of the continent?
What is it about this region that encouraged the growth of heavy
manufacturing industries and all of the related human activities
that have come to dominate here?

MINERAL RESOURCES

The United States is blessed with industrial resources.
America's broad interior plains are nearly enclosed by zones of
metallic mineral concentrations: the Canadian Shield to the
north and two linear areas, one extending northeast-southwest
(the Appalachian Mountains) and one extending northwest-southeast
(the Rocky Mountains). Furthermore, much of these same interior
plains are underlain by large deposits of high-quality mineral
fuel, especially in the eastern section. In terms of the mineral
requirements of heavy industry, then, a relatively small
triangular region contains much of what is needed.

Also, the interior portion of America's Manufacturing Core
possesses great accessibility resources. Connecting the
mineral-rich Canadian Shield and the fuel-rich interior plains,
the five
Great Lakes--Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and
Ontario--represent an internal waterway unlike any other in the
world.
The Great Lakes are interconnected with only two significant
changes of elevation. A small drop of about 6.7 meters between
Lake Superior and Lakes Huron and Michigan was overcome by locks
at Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, first opened in 1855. The much
greater change of elevation between Lakes Erie and Ontario might
have been a serious barrier to water transport, but the Welland
Canal (first opened in 1829) was built in Ontario to skirt
Niagara Falls, and the Erie Canal was constructed (by 1825) in
New York to permit some freight to avoid Lake Ontario altogether.
With these exceptions, the lakes offered well over 800 kilometers
of inexpensive transportation to early developers of America.
Later, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the same cheap
transportation was of critical importance to those moving the
Shield's iron ore to the coal fields in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio,
West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Much of the basis for the
location of the industrial capacity that developed along the
southern margins of the Great Lakes can be attributed to this
natural accessibility resource.

Within the interior core, flowing westward from deep within
the coal-rich Appalachian region, the Ohio River crosses the
interior plains for hundreds of kilometers before joining the
Mississippi River. Dozens of tributaries supply the Ohio with
its water and provide further accessibility, either directly
because they are navigable, too, or less directly because they
offer easier routes of land movement through their valleys.
Along the western margin of the core region, the Mississippi
River and its tributaries provide access from the south and west.

So unique is this combination of spatial and mineral
resources that the Manufacturing Core in the United States is
often thought of as this interior territory alone. References to
"the industrial Midwest" or "America's industrial heartland" may
seek to fire the imagination, but they are geographically
incomplete. The American Manufacturing Core includes both the
interior core and Megalopolis, the urban region through which the
interior has its primary linkage to international commerce.

Prior to 1830, the region's urban and industrial development
was limited almost entirely to the Atlantic Coast in the ports'
immediate hinterlands. European settlement of the
trans-Appalachian area consisted of scattered subsistence
agriculture
and a few urban outposts. Between 1830 and the outbreak of the
U.S. Civil War in 1860, population density in the interior
increased and agriculture intensified and began to produce a
regular surplus, spurring demand for efficient centers of
exchange. The foundations for the growth of the region are
reflected in the gradual shift of transportation concentration as
railroad lines began to be spread across the interior plains.

The technological changes that directly affected the
manufacturing geography of the United States have been grouped by
one geographer, John Borchert, into four periods, or historical
epochs as he called them.

Writing in Geographic Review, Borchert identified
the
earliest period, 1790-1830, as the Sail-Wagon Epoch. During this
period, almost all cities and towns were associated with water
transportation. The Atlantic ports and towns that had their
beginnings along some of the coastal rivers were the major urban
centers. The greatest inland urban growth during this period
occurred along the main inland waterways--the Mohawk River, the
Great Lakes, and the Ohio River.

The second period, 1830-1870, was triggered by development
of the railway, a radical innovation in land movement. The Iron
Horse Epoch at first stimulated further growth in the already
established port locations. The new railway networks were
constructed to focus on the port cities. Aside from additional
growth of the larger port cities in what was soon to become
Megalopolis, the greatest growth occurred in such cities as
Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), Cincinnati (Ohio), and Louisville
(Kentucky) (all on the Ohio River); Buffalo (New York), Erie
(Pennsylvania), Cleveland (Ohio), Detroit (Michigan), Chicago
(Illinois), and Milwaukee (Wisconsin) (all on the lower Great
Lakes); and St. Louis (Missouri), Memphis (Tennessee), and New
Orleans (Louisiana) (all on the Mississippi River).

The Steel-Rail Epoch, 1870-1920, was stimulated by the
development of steel, the replacement of iron rails with stronger
and heavier steel rails, increased demand for bituminous coal,
and the spread of electric power generation. Although the
greatest growth in national urban areas occurred in cities only
peripheral to the Manufacturing Core, there were several notable
exceptions--the numerous smaller cities near the coal fields,
near the Great Lakes, or on one of the major rail connections
between larger cities. These cities were able to establish
themselves because the interconnecting rail network crisscrossed
the region so densely between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes.
Akron, Canton, and Youngstown, Ohio, are clear examples, because
they are located between the coal-and-steel city of Pittsburgh
and the iron-ore port and steel city of Cleveland.

A fourth epoch, the period 1920-1960, was the
Auto-Air-Amenity Epoch. The main effects of transport
innovations such as
the automobile and the airplane were to increase individual
mobility and to minimize the impact of shipment costs in the
production process. Industry was drawn to areas of greatest
population growth; these were primarily the amenity areas
(California, Florida, Arizona) outside the traditional
manufacturing core.

The United States entered yet another period after 1960, one
that might be called the Information Technology Epoch. As the
U.S. economy becomes more dependent on the production and
exchange of information, the means of processing and transmitting
this information will encourage the growth of industries that do
not need cheap bulk transportation or even large population
clusters. This suggests that those factors that supported growth
in the Manufacturing Core cities during the first two-thirds of
the 20th century will no longer provide those cities with special
development advantages during future decades, although their
skilled labor forces, large markets, and established air
transportation patterns will make some of them strong competitors
for growth.

CITIES IN THE REGION

With Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore based
early and firmly on commerce and the financial exchanges it
stimulated, these ports and their satellites began to accumulate
population long before manufacturing became dominant in the U.S.
economy. Although manufacturing was drawn to the eastern coast
by the promise of matchless local markets, tremendous labor
supplies, and easy access to water transportation, the economies
of most of Megalopolis's cities maintained a distinctly
professional character.

New England was the exception by developing manufacturing at
the same time that its ports were growing. Shipbuilding
industries thrived along the coast and generated countless
subsidiary manufacturing operations needed to supply such a
complex industrial undertaking. When factory industry began to
grow in importance elsewhere in America, New England had several
advantages that kept manufacturing significant, the most
important of which was the ready availability of power in the
area's small but abundant rivers.

Boston, as the regional capital of New England,
characterizes many of the changes in this portion of the
continental core. Boston's apparel and leather industries, as
well as shipbuilding in nearby Connecticut, are remnants of an
earlier period, but most growth in the last 50 or so years has
occurred in electronic components and machinery. The harbor and
the facilities found there remain excellent, but industry in New
England now ships most of its products by land, either to markets
in the rest of the United States or south to New York for export
through Megalopolis's primary port.

New York's primacy among American harbors has been
discussed. As might be expected, manufacturing industries found
proximity to this node of international commerce and the
population cluster around it to be very advantageous. So strong
was this pull that New York's industrial mix became extremely
diversified. Many industries were located on Manhattan until
after the beginning of the 20th century. The increasing demand
for space by the even more space-intensive office businesses
gradually pushed the heavier industry to the very margins of
lower Manhattan or beyond the island's confines into the New
Jersey tidal marshes across the Hudson River.

The New York metropolitan economy has been dominated for
some time by office industries. These are the headquarters for
activities of dozens of companies and corporations, the banking
and insurance cluster, publishing houses, and all the other
service and control centers that require a worldwide information
network and the facilities to transmit their responses rapidly.

Philadelphia and Baltimore, so different in industrial
inheritance and urban character, have shown indications during
recent years that they may be becoming more alike. Philadelphia's
manufacturing base is almost as diversified as New York's,
although there is a greater emphasis on food-processing
industries and on shipbuilding and ship repair.

The growth of Philadelphia's industrial base suffered
somewhat from the presence of New York's better harbor and
superior access to the interior only 120 kilometers to the north.
But Philadelphia's better access to the coal and steel regions of
western Pennsylvania, its respectable port facilities, and its
heritage as an early political and cultural center in the United
States have maintained the Philadelphia metropolitan region's
growth within Megalopolis. Baltimore, on the other hand, has
always been on the periphery of the Manufacturing Core region.
Like Philadelphia, its port possessed good rail connections with
the coal and steel regions of the interior, and Baltimore's
industrial mix reflects this. The manufacture of transport
machinery is also important in Baltimore.

Two additional industrial sectors--metals fabrication and
chemicals--are well represented in Philadelphia and Baltimore,
and they emphasize the coastal connections of these regions with
the heavy industrial interior.

The major cities of the other, larger portion of America's
Manufacturing Core region, the industrial Midwest, have derived
their primary character from their location relative to the rich
mineral and agricultural resources of the continent's interior.
Almost all of the large cities in the western portion of the
manufacturing region are located along the Ohio River or one of
its tributaries, or along the shores of one of the Great Lakes.

Most important in the development of urban centers in the
interior portion of the Manufacturing Core has been the movement
of metallic mineral ores from the margins of the Canadian Shield
to the coal fields of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and
the smaller movement of coal in the reverse direction. Iron ore
is mined at the Mesabi range of northern Minnesota and at the
Gogebic, Marquette, and Menominee ranges in northern Michigan and
Wisconsin. Mesabi ore is now processed into pellets at the
deposit site, but for decades unprocessed ore was carried to the
southern shores of Lakes Michigan and Erie in large ships
designed specially for Great Lakes travel. Pellets and ore are
carried to the southern shore of Lake Michigan, to Hammond and
Gary in Indiana, where these shipments are met by coal
transported north by rail from the large Illinois coal fields.
Most of the ore, however, is shipped to Lake Erie ports. From
there, it is either carried south, primarily to the steel cities
of the Ohio River, or converted to steel in the lakeside cities
using coal carried north on the return rail trip from the
Appalachian fields.

Of the cities of the interior core, Pittsburgh is the one
whose name became synonymous with steel. Located where the
Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio River,
Pittsburgh was in an excellent position to take advantage of
access to both raw materials and downriver markets. The
Allegheny and the Monongahela drain the coal-rich margins of the
Appalachians, and the Ohio flows along the southern margins of
the Agricultural Core and into the Mississippi. As Pittsburgh
grew, industries that depend on steel crowded onto the narrow
river bottoms to take advantage of proximity to low-cost water
transportation. Metal-fabricating industries, machine parts, and
other industrial consumers of large quantities of steel located
their plants in and around Pittsburgh. Nearby cities also
benefited from the powerful pull of steel at Pittsburgh.
Youngstown, Canton, and Steubenville in Ohio, Wheeling and
Weirton in West Virginia, and New Castle and Johnstown in
Pennsylvania shared to some degree in the industrial growth of
this region and obtained steel and steel products industries.

Urban-industrial growth did not occur solely at the source
region of coal. The iron ore shipped across the lake system had
to be transferred to railroads at points along the Lake Erie
shore for final movement to the Pittsburgh region.

Cleveland was the largest of the Lake Erie port cities.
Cleveland's initial growth was stimulated by a canal connecting
the narrow and winding Cuyahoga River with a tributary of the
Ohio River. Although the city quickly outgrew this small initial
advantage, it was enough to give Cleveland a head start on its
nearby urban competitors. The diverse industrial base that
resulted took advantage of the accessibility offered by the lakes
and by the major east-west railroads connecting New York with
Chicago and the Agricultural Core to the west. Cleveland's
growth also spilled over into adjacent ports, such as Lorain,
Ashtabula, and Conneaut, Ohio, and perhaps as far east as Erie,
Pennsylvania, and as far west as Toledo, Ohio, as well as to
complementary growth centers inland, such as the rubber-producing
city of Akron, Ohio.

Buffalo, New York, is located at the eastern end of Lake
Erie. Wheat from the Plains states is brought to the western
Great Lakes and carried in bulk to Buffalo for refining. The
same factors that generated steel and metals manufacturing
elsewhere along the lakeshore helped ensure that a significant
portion of the city's manufacturing would be connected to this
type of industry. The harnessing of nearby Niagara Falls for
hydroelectric power attracted chemical and aluminum industries.

The city on the narrow water passage between Lakes Huron and
Erie, Detroit, grew rapidly only early in the 20th century
because it is located more than 80 kilometers north of the
primary New York-Chicago rail connection. It was not until the
rise of the industry that fostered the railroads' chief land
transport competitor--motor vehicles--that Detroit developed the
character for which it is best known. The most successful
automobile manufacturers concentrated in Detroit and nearby
cities, and the demand for automobiles skyrocketed, drawing a
variety of component suppliers to southeastern Michigan.

The smaller of the two remaining metropolitan centers along
the southern Great Lakes margin is Milwaukee. In addition to its
industrial mix of heavy industry and motor vehicle manufacturing,
Milwaukee is one of the leading centers of the brewing industry,
a result of the large number of German immigrants who settled in
Wisconsin during the late 19th century. A significant food
processing industry is also present in Milwaukee, because it is a
major focus for the middle Dairy Belt of the state.

Chicago is easily the dominant city of the interior
Manufacturing Core. So important did this city become that, for
many years it was called the "Second City," recognizing Chicago's
population (2,725,979 in 1990) as second only to that of New York
City. Although Los Angeles now outranks Chicago in population,
the informal "capital" of the Midwest persists as the strongest
urban focus of the United States' interior.

Located along the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan,
Chicago occupies the optimum location for the transfer of people
and goods between lake transportation and the rich agricultural
region to the west and southwest. The Illinois and Michigan
Canal, located in part through the heart of the city, was
completed in 1848 to link the Great Lakes and the Mississippi
River system. Four years later, Chicago was connected to New
York by rail and became the primary regional rail focus in the
Midwest.

Chicago absorbed thousands of immigrants throughout the
later 19th century and spawned a radial network of rail lines
into Illinois, Wisconsin, and the agricultural states beyond.
Meatpacking developed around the city's large stockyards. Other
industries, such as furniture and clothing manufacturers, located
there to take advantage of the growing local market and good
access to markets farther west. After the turn of the century,
the steel industry was introduced to the Chicago region, south of
the city itself but still along the lakeshore in Illinois and
Indiana and easily accessible to the city's unparalleled railroad
network.

Already a city of 1 million by 1890, Chicago doubled in size
before 1910 and exceeded 3 million by the mid-1920s. The volume
of Chicago's manufacturing activities today is matched only by
the immense diversity of products manufactured, making the city
at least partly an effective regional counterbalance to the
intense economic nodes in Megalopolis.